From a MyModernMet.com online article:
Since I work as a fine artist now, there are fewer commercial entities to please, so I’ve discovered something that should have been very obvious. If you want to engage the viewer, don’t tell them everything, encourage them to ask their own questions. An artist should not describe—he or she should interpret. If you design into your work a bit of mystery—areas where the viewer must “fill in the blanks”—you set up an unspoken dialog with your viewers and an emotional weight will begin to develop organically. This is just one example of course, but an important one.
Artist Thomas W. Schaller combines a passion for architecture and storytelling into emotional landscape watercolor paintings. Originally trained as an architect, he found himself drawn to images of the built environment and eventually left designing behind to pursue fine art on a full-time basis. His education places him in an ideal position for architecture painting. Schaller understands how to design structures and knows what attributes to include and what he should leave out. At the same time, he’s able to tap into the feelings we get from visiting a city—such as a sentimentality—to produce pieces that are both beautiful and alluring.
Today’s edition features Harvard professor Steven Pinker. As an experimental psychologist, Steven has written extensively about violence – and for his choice from the gallery’s collection he has selected two of Pablo Picasso’s most gruesome depictions of man’s inhumanity, Charnel House and Guernica, now housed in Madrid.
Masterpieces of Painting surveys more than one hundred of the most exquisite and significant paintings displayed in the museum’s famed, daylight-suffused galleries. Vibrant full-color illustrations and engaging descriptions of these masterworks reveal their fascinating histories and cultural, social, and religious meanings. Sure to enchant and edify all art lovers, this book is a spellbinding tour through the history of Western painting.
Rooted in a passion for the Italian Renaissance as well as Dutch and Flemish Baroque works, the original collection of J. Paul Getty (1892–1976) has been transformed over four decades to include seminal pieces by celebrated masters such as Masaccio, Titian, Parmigianino, Cranach, El Greco, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin, Canaletto, Fragonard, Turner, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne, and Ensor.
Boomers Daily 